Archive for February 16th, 2010

Reader John sends along this dispatch, another entry in America’s most impassioned, and irrelevant, debate about traffic safety: People driving too slowly in the left lane. Apparently the Georgia legislature has some time on its hands (time saved from speeding along in the left lane),

ATLANTA — It’s a pet peeve for many drivers — getting behind a “slow poke” who won’t get out of the fast lane.

Note: Since it’s laws we’re talking here, in no state highway code is there inscribed such a thing as the “fast lane.”

“I think someone who’s driving 40 miles an hour on a highway that everyone else is doing 65 to 75 on is just as much of a hazard as someone who’s doing 110 in a 70,” said Atlanta driver Vajra Stratigos.

A one-person sample size! Why wade through the traffic safety research — which isn’t exactly filled with case studies of untold numbers of people dying horrific deaths by driving too slowly — when you can just quote a random driver?

State Rep. Mark Butler of Carrollton is sponsoring a bill that puts some teeth in Georgia’s current law. Butler’s bill calls for a minimum fine of $75 for anyone caught impeding traffic by driving below the speed limit in the passing lane of a multi-lane roadway.

Below the speed limit in the left lane? How many times does this actually happen in Georgia? Has this person actually driven in Atlanta? People drive 40 MPH in the school zones! Remember the huge controversy created when a platoon of vehicles tried to actually drive the speed limit in every lane? A vehicular riot almost ensued.

“The far left-hand lane, with the exception of the HOV lane, is supposed to be used for passing,” said Butler.

As a commenter to this blog noted recently, this is not as clear cut as it seems. A driver going 70 in the left lane, passing every driver he sees, is still going to be seen as a ‘left-lane slowpoke’ by the driver going 75.

Butler said he’s not trying to encourage speeding. “It’s about road courtesy and lane discipline, and that’s what we’re hoping to promote with this bill,” he said.

Atlanta driver Michael Johnson doesn’t think the bill is fair. “It’s just another something else to get more money,” he said.

Driver Joel Linderman said it would probably make slow drivers think twice about jumping in the fast lane. “I think after a couple of your friends get fined for that, I think the word will get out,” he said.

The same way people think twice about driving faster than the legally posted speed, for sure!

The bill passed easily in a House subcommittee meeting on Tuesday morning. It now heads to the full House Transportation Committee.

Where it will no doubt sail through on the merits! Who says lawmakers cannot reach consensus!

We’ve seen that slime mold can function as an incipient urban planner, but leaves offer lessons too, notes the Economist:

Traditionally, biologists have celebrated the trunk, branch and twig system of a tree as no accident. Many mathematical formulas have suggested it is the best, least wasteful way to design a distribution network. But the very end of such a network, the leaf, has a different architecture. Unlike the xylem and phloem, the veins in a leaf cross-link and loop. Francis Corson of Rockefeller University in New York used computer models to examine why these loops exist.

From an evolutionary point of view, loops seem inefficient because of the redundancy inherent in a looped network. Dr Corson’s models show, however, that this inefficiency is true only if demand for water and the nutrients it contains is constant. By studying fluctuations in demand he discovered one purpose of the loops: they allow for a more nuanced delivery system. Flows can be rerouted through the network in response to local pressures in the environment, such as different evaporation rates in different parts of a leaf.

It’s interesting to think of this configuration vis a vis urban/suburban street networks, when less permeable systems push traffic to larger arterial systems — a benefit for those living in the less permeable areas (say, the second photo above, which I believe comes from a stalled subdivision in Florida), until of course there’s some traffic issue on the main line and less opportunity for rerouting flows. The leaf has no cul-de-sacs, no dead-ends.

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.